Against Self-Defense

Absolute Pacifism (or AP) is the thesis that no act of assault is morally permissible. This entails that all acts of self-defensive assault are impermissible. This essay defends AP against non-eliminativist theories of justified self-defensive assault - that is, theories of self-defensive assault which, contrary to AP, claim that at least some instances of self-defensive assault are morally permissible. Chapter 1 begins by defining assault and AP and subsequently exploring a species of AP wedded to the Doctrine of Double Effect (or DDE). Chapter 2 defends AP against the thesis that self-defensive assault is morally permissible but not morally obligatory. Against this, it is argued that there can be no mere right to self-defensive assault since that right would render permissible causing unnecessary harm. Chapter 3 defends AP against the thesis that self-defensive assault is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory. Against this, it is argued that there can be no duty to engage in self-defensive assault because there is a trivializability constraint which makes the existence of those duties impossible. Since if there are permissible instances of self-defensive assault they are either mere rights or duties, and since there are no instances of either, it follows that there are no instances of permissible self-defensive assault

The Resurrection of Radical Pacifism: A Defense

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019Within the ethics of self-defense, the predominant view is that there are liability justifications for harming. A minority position, which I call radical pacifism, denies that there are liability justifications for harming. This dissertation offers three separate arguments against the predominant view and for the radical pacifist view. The first paper, “Animal Rights Pacifism,” demonstrates how attentiveness to our moral duties to animals generates counterintuitive moral conclusions that can be most plausibly avoided only by appeal to pacifism. The second paper, “Multiple Threats and the Specter of Pacifism,” shows that anti-pacifism is itself radical, since it entails that there can be unlimited liability justifications for harming. The final paper, “Against Self-Defense,” makes use of Nozickian moral side-constraints and defends the existence of the Cavalier Constraint according to which killing ought never to be done with moral ease. The anti-pacifist view allows for the violation of this constraint, however, and is therefore false